Bedouin activist to give testimony in land ownership case

Ma'an
Bedouin rights activist Nuri Al-Okbi, will give testimony before Judge Sarah Dovrat concerning his prolonged legal struggle to prove his ownership of family land in the town of Al-Arakib northwest of Beersheba in Israel on Monday...

Forty years ago, Al-Okabi’s father, Sheikh Sliman Muhammad, presented a claim against the Israeli government’s Land Arrangement Clerk concerning the family’s eviction from their house and land in 1951. For the past two years, the case has been heard by Judge Sarah Dovrat at the Beersheba District Court.

"In 1951, while still a child, the army deported my family and my entire tribe from the land. They told us that it was only for half a year, but we were never allowed to go back" says Al-Okbi.

Al-Okabi called on “all seekers for peace and justice” to attend to court as he presents his testimony at 10am on Monday.

"On December 7 will come the moment I waited for a long time – the moment when I will have the opportunity to address the court and present documents, some of them a hundred years old, making abundantly clear that the land had belonged to - and was inhabited and worked by our tribe - generations ago, long before the State of Israel was established. Contrary to the lie often heard in the media, about 'Bedouins invading state lands', we are not invaders or squatters – we are on our own ancestral lands."

During the last three years, Al-Okbi has been living in a tent erected on lands in Al-Arakib near the site of his family where he was born. He has been evicted on numerous occasions by the police but always returned. Full story